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Overview

The Drummond family, reunited for the first time in years, has gathered near Cape Canaveral to watch the launch into space of their beloved daughter and sister, Sarah. Against the Technicolor unreality of Florida's finest tourist attractions, the Drummonds stumble into every illicit activity under the tropical sun-kidnapping, blackmail, gunplay, and black market negotiations, to name a few. But even as the Drummonds' lives spin out of control, Coupland reminds us of their humanity at every turn, hammering out a hilarious masterpiece with the keen eye of a cultural critic and the heart and soul of a gifted storyteller. He tells not only the characters' stories but also the story of our times--thalidomide, AIDS, born-again Christianity, drugs, divorce, the Internet-all bound together with the familiar glue of family love and madness.

Product Details

About the Author

Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian Armed Forces Base in Baden-Söllingen, Germany, in 1961. He is the author of the novels Miss Wyoming, Generation X, and Girlfriend in a Coma, among others, as well as the nonfiction works Life After God and Polaroids from the Dead. He grew up and lives in Vancouver, Canada.Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian Armed Forces Base in Baden-Söllingen, Germany, in 1961. He is the author of the novels Miss Wyoming, Generation X, and Girlfriend in a Coma, among others, as well as the nonfiction works Life After God and Polaroids from the Dead. He grew up and lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Janet opened her eyes  Florida's prehistoric glare dazzled outside the motel window. A dog barked; a car honked; a man was singing a snatch of a Spanish song. She absentmindedly touched the scar from the bullet wound beneath her left ribcage, a scar that had healed over, bumpy and formless and hard, like a piece of gum stuck beneath a tabletop. She hadn't expected her flesh to have healed so blandly  What was I expecting, a scar shaped like an American flag?

Janet's forehead flushed: My children  where are they? She did a rapid-fire tally of the where abouts of her three children, a ritual she'd enacted daily since the birth of Wade back in 1958. Once she'd mentally placed her offspring in their geographic slots, she remembered to breathe: They're all going to be here in Orlando today.

She looked at the motel's bed side clock: 7:03 A.M. Pillo'clock. She took two capsules from her prescription pill caddie and swallowed them with tap water gone flat overnight, which now tasted like nickels and pennies. It registered on her that motel rooms now came equipped with coffee makers. What a sensible idea, so bloody sensible  why didn't they do this years ago? Why is all the good stuff happening now?

A few days back, on the phone, her daughter, Sarah, had said, 'Mom, at least buy Evian, OK? The tap water in that heap is probably laced with crack. I can't believe you chose to stay there.'

'But dear, I don't mind it here.'

'Go stay at the Peabody with the rest of the family. I've told you a hundred times I'll pay.'

'That's not the point, dear. A hotel really ought not cost more than this.'

'Mom, NASA cuts deals with the hotels, and ...' Sarah made a puff of air, acknowledging defeat. 'Forget it. But I think you're too well off to be pulling your Third World routine.'

Sarah  so cavalier with money!  as were the two others. None had known poverty, and they'd never known war, but the advantage hadn't made them golden, and Janet had never gotten over this fact. A life of abundance had turned her two boys into an element other than gold  lead?  silicon?  bismuth? But then Sarah  Sarah was an element finer than gold  carbon crystallized as diamond  a bolt of lightning frozen in midflash, sliced into strips, and stored in a vault.

Janet's phone rang and she answered it: Wade, calling from an Orange County lock-up facility. Janet imagined Wade in a drab concrete hallway, unshaven and disheveled, yet still radiating 'the glint'  the spark in the eye he'd inherited from his father. Bryan didn't have it and Sarah didn't need it, but Wade had glinted his way through life, and maybe it hadn't been the best attribute to inherit after all.

Wade: Janet remembered being back home, and driving along Marine Drive in the morning, watching a certain type of man waiting for a bus to take him downtown. He'd be slightly seedy and one or two notches short of respectability; it was always patently clear he'd lost his driver's license after a DWI, but this only made him more interesting, and whenever Janet smiled at one of these men from her car, they fired a smile right back. And that was Wade and, in some unflossed cranny of her memory, her ex-husband, Ted.

'Dear, aren't you too old to be calling me from  jail? Even saying the word "jail" feels silly.'

'Mom, I don't do bad stuff any more. This was a fluke.'

'Okay then, what happened  did you accidentally drive a busload of Girl Guides into the Everglades?'

'It was a bar brawl, Mom.'

Janet repeated this: 'A bar brawl.'

'I know, I know  you think I don't know how idiotic that sounds? I'm phoning because I need a ride away from this dump. My rental car's back at the bar.'

'Where's Beth? Why doesn't she drive you?'

'She gets in early this afternoon.'

'OK. Well, let's go back a step, dear. How exactly does one get into a bar brawl?'

'You wouldn't believe me if I told you.'

'You'd be amazed what I'm believing these days. Try me.'

There was a pause on the other end. 'I got in a fight because this guy  this jerk  was making fun of God.'

'God.' He can't be serious.

'Yeah, well, he was.'

'In what way?'

'He was being so nasty about it, saying, "God's an asshole,"and "God doesn't care about squat," and he kept on going on and on, and I had to put a stop to it. I think he got fired that day.'

'You were defending God's honor?'

'Yeah. I was.'

Tread carefully here, Janet. 'Wade, I know Beth is very religious. Are you becoming religious, too?'

'Safely in the arms of a four-hundred-pound convenience store thief named Bubba.'

'Wade, I can't pick you up. I think it's going to be one of those no-energy days. And besides, the car I rented smells like a carpet in a frat house  and the roads down here, they're white, and the glare makes me sleepy.'

'Mom, come on ...'

'Don't be such a baby. You're forty-two. Act it. You couldn't even get to the hotel in time yesterday.'

'I was making a quick detour to visit a friend in Tampa. I stopped for a drink. Hey  don't treat me like I'm Bryan. It wasn't like I started the fight or ...'

'Stop! Stop right there. Call a cab.'

'I'm short on cash.'

'Simple cab fare? Then how are you paying for the hotel?'

Wade was silent.

'Wade?'

'Sarah's covering it for us until we can pay it back.' An awkward silence followed.

'Mom, you could pick me up if you really wanted to. I know you could.'

'Yes, I suppose I could. But I think you should phone your father down in ... what's that place called?'

'Kissimmee  and I already did call him.'

'And?'

'He's gone marlin fishing with Nickie.'

'Marlin fishing? People still do that?'

'I don't know. I guess. I thought they were extinct. They probably have a guy in a wet suit who attaches a big plastic marlin onto their line.'

'Marlins are so ugly. They remind me of basement rec rooms that people built in 1958 and never used again.'

'I know. It's hard to imagine they ever existed in the first place.'

'So he's out marlin fishing with Nickie then?'

'Yeah. With Nickie.'

'That cheesy slut.'

'Mom?'

'Wade, I'm not a saint. I've been holding stuff inside me for decades  girls my age were trained to do that, and it's why we all have colitis. Besides, a dash of spicy language is refreshing every so often. Just yesterday I was hunting for information on vitamin D derivatives on the Internet, and suddenly, doink! I land in the Anal Love website. I'm looking at a cheerleader in a leather harness on the '

'Mom, how can you visit sites like that?'

'Wade, may I remind you that you are standing in a human Dumpster somewhere in Orlando, yet hearing a sixty-five-year-old woman discuss the Internet over a pay phone shocks you? You wouldn't believe the sites I've visited. And the chat rooms, too. I'm not always Janet Drummond, you know.'

'Howie's so boring he makes me almost pass out. I can't believe Sarah married such a blank.'

'I'm the one who gave birth to her, and I'm the one who has to drive with him to Cape Canaveral today.'

'Ooh  bummer. Another NASA do?'

'Yes. And you're welcome to come along.'

'Wait a second, Mom  why aren't you at the Peabody with everybody else? What are you staying in a motel for? By the way, it took thirty rings for the clerk  who, I might add, sounded like a kidney thief  to answer the phone.'

'Wade, you're changing the subject. Phone Howie. Oh wait  I think I hear somebody at the door.' Janet held the phone at arm's length from her head, and said, 'Knock knock knock knock.'

'Very funny, Mom.'

'I have to answer the door, Wade.'

'That's really funny. I '

Click

The motel room made her feel slightly too transient, but it was a bargain, and that turned the minuses into pluses. Nonetheless, Janet missed her morning waking-up rituals in her own bedroom. She touched her body gently and methodically, as though she were at the bank counting a stack of twenties. She gently rubbed a set of ulcers on her lips' insides, still there, same as the day before, not just a dream. Her hands probed further downward  no lumps in her breasts, not today  but then what had Sarah told her? We've all had cancer thousands of times, Mom, but in all those thousands of times your body removed it. It's lazy bookkeeping to only count the cancers that stick. You and I could have cancer right now, but tomorrow it might be gone.

The motel room smelled like a lifetime of cigarettes. She looked at Sarah's photo in the Miami Herald beside the phone, a standard NASA PR crew photo: an upper body shot against a navy ice-cream swirl background and complexion-flattering lighting that made one suspect a noble, scientific disdain for cosmetics. Sarah clutched a helmet underneath her right arm. Her left arm, handless, rested by her side: Space knows no limitations.

Janet sighed. She twiddled her toes. Ten minutes later her phone rang again: Sarah calling from the Cape.

'Hi, Mom. I just spoke to Howie. He'll go pick up Wade.'

'Good morning, Sarah. How's your day?'

'This morning we had a zero-G evacuation test, but what I really wanted to do was sit in a nice quiet bathroom and test out a new brand of pore-cleansing strips. The humidity in these suits is giving me killer blackheads. They never talked about that in those old Life magazine photo essays. Have you eaten yet?'

'No.'

'Come eat at the Cape with me. We can have dehydrated astronaut's ice cream out of a shiny Mylar bag.'

Janet sat up on her bed and pulled her legs over the side. She felt her skin  her meat  hanging from her bones as though it were so much water-logged clothing. She needed to pee. She began to meter her words as she eyed the bathroom door. 'I don't think so, dear. The only time they ever allow me to have with you are three seconds for a photo op.'

Sarah asked, 'Is Beth arriving today?'

Beth was Wade's wife. 'Later this afternoon. I think I'm going to dinner with the two of them.'

'How far along is she?'

'I think this is her fourth month. It may even be a Christmas baby.'

'Huh. I see.'

'Something wrong, Sarah?'

'It's just that '

'What?'

'Mom, how could Wade marry ... her. She's so priggish and born-again. I always thought Wade would marry Miss Roller Derby. Beth is so frigging sanctimonious.'

'She keeps him alive.'

'I guess she does. When does Bryan arrive?'

'He and his girlfriend are already here. He called from the Peabody.'

'Girlfriend? Bryan? What's her name?'

'If I tell you, you won't believe me.'

'It can't be that bad. Is it one of those made-up names like DawnElle or Kerrissa or CindaJo?'

'Worse.'

'What could be worse?'

'Shw.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'Shw. That's her name: Shw.'

'Spell that for me.'

'S. H. W.'

'And?'

'There's no vowel, if that's what you're waiting for.'

'What  her name is Shw? Am I pronouncing that properly?'

'I'm afraid so.'

'That is the most ... impractical name I've ever heard. Is she from Sri Lanka or Finland or something?'

Janet's eye lingered on the bathroom door and the toilet beyond. 'As far as I know she's from Alberta. Bryan worships her, and she's also knocked up like a prom queen.'

'Bryan's pregnant? How come I don't know any of this?'

'I just met her last week myself, dear. She seems to rather like me, though she treats everybody else like dirt. So I don't mind her at all, really.'

'Bryan is such a freak. I'm not going to be able to keep a straight face, you know  when she tells me her name, that is.'

Janet said, 'Shw!'

Sarah giggled.

'Shw! Shw! Shw!'

Sarah laughed. 'Is she pretty?'

'Sort of. She's also about eighteen and an angry little hornet. In the fifties we would have called her a pixie. Nowadays we'd call her hyperthyroid. She's bug-eyed.'

'Where'd they meet?'

'Seattle. She helped Bryan set fire  I believe  to a stack of pastel-colored waffle-knit T-shirts in a Gap  back during the World Trade Organization riots. They were separated, then a few months ago they met again destroying a test facility growing genetically modified runner beans.'

Janet could sense Sarah changing gears; she was finished discussing the family. Next would come business-like matters:'Well, good for Bryan. You're OK for today's NASA gig?'

'Still.'

'Howie will pick you up at 9:30, after he picks up my darling brother. By the way, Dad's broke.'

'That doesn't surprise me. I'd heard he'd lost his job.'

'I tried to loan him some money, but he, of course, said no. Not that there's much to loan. Howie lost the bulk of our savings in some website that sells products for pets. I could strangle him.'

'Oh dear.' It's so easy to fall into the mother mode.

'Tell me about it. Hey, when was the last time you even saw Dad?'

'Half a year ago. By accident at Super-Valu.'

'Tense?'

'I can handle him.'

'Good. See you there.'

'Yes, dear.'

Click

On the walkway outside her room, Janet heard children mewling as they set off to Walt Disney World with their families. She walked to the bathroom across a floor made lunar from eons of cigarette burns and various stains better left uninvestigated. She thought of serial murderers using acids to dissolve the teeth and jawbones of their victims.

She unsuspectingly caught sight of herself in a floor-length mirror by the sink and the sight stopped her cold. Yes, Janet, that's correct: you are shrinking  sinew by sinew, protein molecule by protein molecule you are turning into an ... an elf, yes, you, Janet Drummond, once voted 'Girl We'd Rob a Bank For.'

She was transfixed by the view of herself in a blue nightie, as if she were once again young and this image had been delivered to her from the future as a warning  If I squint I can still see the cool immaculate housewife I once dreamed of becoming. I'm Elizabeth Montgomery starring in Bewitched. I'm Dina Merrill lunching at the Museum of Modern Art with Christina Ford.

Oh forget it. She peed, showered, dried and then modified those traces of time's passage on her face that she could.

There. I'm not so bad after all. A man might still rob a bank for me, and men still do flirt  not too frequently  and older men perhaps  but the look in the eyes never changes.

She dressed, and five minutes later she was a block away sitting in a Denny's reading a paper. The North American weather map on the rear page was a rich, unhealthy crimson, with only a small strip of cool green running up the coast from Seattle to Alaska. Outside the restaurant window the sun on the parking lot made the area seem like a science experiment. She realized she no longer cared about the weather. Next.

Back in her motel room, she lay down on the bed haunted by a thousand sex acts. OK  this place is creepy but at least I'm not throwing away money. Her lips were sore to the point that speech was painful, and it hurt to exhale. Her pill buzzer buzzed; she sat up. She reached into her purse and removed a prescription bottle. She turned on the TV, and there was Sarah being interviewed on CNN. As always, her daughter looked glowingly pretty on TV, like a nun who'd never touched makeup.

 Do you think you and children like you, born with damage caused by thalidomide, have other messages to tell the world?

 Of course. We were the canaries in the coal mine. We were the first children born in which it was proved that chemicals from the outside world  in our case thalidomide  could severely damage the human embryo. These days, most mothers don't smoke or drink during pregnancy. They know that the outer world can enter their babies and cause damage. But in my mother's generation, they didn't know this. They smoked and drank and took any number of medications without thinking twice. Now we know better, and as a species we're smarter as a result  we're aware of teratogens.

 Teratogens?

 Yes. It means 'monster forming'. A horrible word, but then the world can be a horrible place. They're the chemicals that cross the placenta and affect a child's growth in utero.

The host turned to the camera: 'Time for a quick break. I've been speaking with Sarah Drummond-Fournier, a one-handed woman, and one heck of a fighter, who'll be on Friday's shuttle flight. We'll be right back.'

How on earth did I give birth to such a child? I understand nothing about her life. Nothing. And yet she's the spitting image of me, and she's gallivanting up into space. Janet remembered how much she'd wanted to help the young Sarah with her homework, and Sarah's polite-but-resigned invitations to come do so when Janet popped her head into Sarah's doorway. Invariably Janet would look down at the papers that might as well have been in Chinese. Janet would ask a few concerned questions about Sarah's teachers, and then plead kitchen duty, beating a hasty retreat.

She turned off the TV.

She once cared about everything, and if she couldn't muster genuine concern, she could easily fake it: too much rain stunting the petunias; her children's scrapes; stick figure Africans; the plight of marine mammals. She considered herself one of the surviving members of a lost generation, the last generation raised to care about appearances or doing the right thing  to care about caring. She had been born in 1934 in Toronto, a city then much like Chicago or Rochester or Detroit  bland, methodical, thrifty and rules-playing. Her father, William Truro, managed the furniture and household appliance department of the downtown Eaton's department store. William's wife, Kaye, was, well ... William's wife.

The two raised Janet and her older brother, Gerald, on $29.50 a week until 1938, when a salary decrease lowered William's pay to $27 a week, and jam vanished from the Truro breakfast table, the absence of which became Janet's first memory. After the jam, the rest of Janet's life seemed to have been an on going reduction  things that had once been essential vanishing without discussion, or even worse, with too much discussion.

Seasons changed. Sweaters became ragged, were patched up and became ragged again, and were grudgingly thrown out. A few flowers were grown in the thin band of dirt in front of the brick row house, species scavenged by Kaye for their value as dried flowers, which scrimped an extra few months' worth of futility from them. Life seemed to be entirely about scrimping. In fall of 1938, Gerald died of polio. In 1939 the war began and Canada was in it from the start, and scrimping kicked into overdrive: bacon fat, tin cans, rubber  all material objects  were scrimp-worthy. Janet's most enjoyable childhood memories were of sorting neighborhood trash in the alleys, in search of crown jewels, metal fragments and love notes from dying princes. During the war, houses in her neighborhood grew dingy  paint became a luxury. When she was six, Janet walked into the kitchen and found her father kissing her mother passionately. They saw Janet standing there, a small, chubby, fuddled Campbell's Soup kid, and they broke apart, blushed, and the incident was never spoken of again. The glimpse was her only evidence of passion until womanhood.

An hour passed and Janet looked at the bed side clock: almost9:30, and Howie would have already picked up Wade by now. Janet walked down to the hotel's covered breezeway to wait for her son-in-law. A day of boredom loomed.

Then, pow! she was angry all of a sudden. She was angry because she was unable to remember and re-experience her life as a continuous movie-like event. There were only bits of punctuation here and there  the kiss, the jam, the dried flowers  which, when assembled, made Janet who she was  yet there seemed to be no divine logic behind the assemblage. Or any flow. All those bits were merely ... bits. But there had to be logic. How could the small, chubby child of 1940 imagine that one day she'd be in Florida seeing her own daughter launched into outer space? Tiny little Sarah, who was set to circle the Earth hundreds of times. We didn't even think about outer-space in 1939. Space didn't exist yet.

She removed a black felt Sharpie pen from her purse, and wrote the word 'laryngitis' on a folded piece of paper. For the remainder of the day she wouldn't have to speak to anybody she didn't want to.

I wonder if Howie is going to be late? No  Howie's not the late type.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble ReviewSometimes the only difference between drugstore novels and Shakespeare is the level of writing. For all their wit and intelligence, Shakespeare's plays have more in common with the plotlines for Days of Our Lives than you would outwardly think. Douglas Coupland, author of Girlfriend in a Coma and Generation X, knows this. His seventh novel, All Families are Psychotic, is a nightmarish, sardonic soap opera about one battered family that falls somewhere between Valley of the Dolls and All's Well That Ends Well.

The fractured Drummonds have just descended upon Orlando, Florida -- like a swarm of flies on fresh roadkill -- for one hell of a family reunion. The baby of the family, Sarah, a one-handed astronaut, is preparing to be launched into space. What should be a cause for celebration, however, is the impetus for scratching familial scabs. Janet, the 65-year old matriarch with a penchant for sex chat rooms and cheap hotels, is dying. The previous year, the philandering eldest son, Wade, met a beautiful redhead in an airport and had a brief midday fling. Unbeknownst to him, the woman was his father, Ted's, new trophy wife, Nickie. When daddy dearest found out, he tracked his son down at Janet's home and shot him, but the bullet cut clean through Wade and entered Janet's lung. Wade, we find out later, has AIDS and has infected not only his mother, via his blood on the bullet, but also Nickie. And then there's Brian, the youngest brother, an unlucky, brooding man who has unsuccessfully attempted suicide three times, and his radical burn-down-big-business pregnant girlfriend, Shw (that's right, Shw -- no vowels). What ensues when all these volatile folks mix it up in the state of Florida is an outlandish and mordantly funny story that involves a black-market baby, a kidnapping, a letter from Prince Charles, and -- believe it or not -- second chances.

Coupland is by far one of our most astute writers -- someone who has his finger on the deathly faint pulse of contemporary society. Though All Families Are Psychotic sounds like a deep foray into the absurd, it is really a novel about healing, the fragility of our relationships with those we love and hate the most, and the all-too-familiar desire for acceptance and redemption. Yes, the world can be a nasty place, but sometimes it's our own internal worlds that do the most damage -- and sometimes you need those psychos in your family to get you through it. (Stephen Bloom)

bn.com

The Drummond family at the center of Coupland's new novel resembles a month's worth of soap opera plots. Wade Drummond and his mother, Janet, both have AIDS. Janet, 65, was infected when her ex-husband, Ted, shot Wade through the side of his stomach and the bullet lodged in Janet's lung. Ted shot Wade because his son had accidentally had sex with Ted's second wife, Nickie. In consequence, Nickie is also HIV positive. Wade's brother, Bryan, a frequently suicidal musician, has hooked up with the self-named Shw, a young anarchist. Shw has told Bryan she wants to abort her baby, but secretly she is planning to sell it to Lloyd and Gale, a seemingly normal Florida couple with kinky secrets. Now, all the Drummonds are having a family reunion in Orlando. They are gathered to support Sarah, the successful member of the family, as she is about to be shot into space. Although slightly crippled, being a thalidomide baby, Susan has made a career as a scientist and an astronaut. Her bland husband, Howie, is covertly sleeping with Alanna, the wife of Gordon Brunswick, Sarah's mission commander and Sarah is secretly having an affair with Gordon. The item that sets this crew in motion is a letter from Prince William left on Princess Diana's coffin. It has somehow come into possession of a sleazeball named Norm, who wants Wade and Ted to convey it to a billionaire Anglophile based in the Bahamas. Complications, naturally, ensue. Like Chuck Palahniuk, Coupland mines tabloid territory for sensationalism, which he then undermines with ironic self-awareness. The can-you-top-this atmosphere will keep Coupland's Gen-X readers (the ones who religiously watch Cops for the laughs) totally amused. Author tour.(Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

You may think that your family is the most psychotic, but meet the Drummonds: shady errand-runner Wade, the oldest, is HIV-positive and has infected his mother, Janet, in a scenario too complicated to relate here; paterfamilias Ted has prostate cancer but clings to his virility via trophy wife Nickie, who is also HIV-positive; born-loser Bryan has impregnated hippie hell-child, Shw; and baby sister Sarah, the seemingly normal one, is about to undertake a space mission for NASA. Coupland, who dubbed the post-boomer babies "Generation X" with his book of the same name, continues his sociological study here. Divorce has dented the Drummond children, who grew up in the 1970s, as well as their parents, but in Coupland's contemporary America that makes them all the more vulnerable to reunions. Unbelievably awful and miraculous things happen in the days leading up to Sarah's launch in Florida, where they all convene, but the subplots descend into lame-brained slapstick. As anyone in a psychotic family can tell you, chaos is often predictable, and it is here. The vignettes on Janet, who, at 65, has recently broken out of the 1950s wife mold in which she was cast, add some needed depth, but it's not enough to take readers to the moon and back. For larger collections. Heather McCormack, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A thin, occasionally maudlin poke at the pharmaceutical industry. The Zeitgeist-defining novelist who tagged his rudderless contemporaries Generation X (1991) is now 40 but still feels his characters' pain. Here, plucky 67-year-old matriarch Janet presides over the discombobulated Drummond clan-two freaky sons, one square daughter, numerous dotty spouses, and a mean ex-husband-as it gathers in sweltering midsummer Orlando for the launch of a NASA shuttle carrying Sarah Drummond-Fournier. The much-admired astronaut was a born with one hand, thanks to the thalidomide her mother took during pregnancy, and the ironies roll on as Internet-savvy Janet reveals she is taking the drug again for mouth ulcers caused by AIDS. How did she get the dread disease? A bullet meant for seropositive son Wade (shot by his enraged, drunken father Ted) penetrated her body after passing through Wade's. Meanwhile, as Coupland continues to pile on the action, much of it slapstick, Wade, equally clueless brother Bryan, and dipsomaniac Ted-all in need of some quick cash- descend on Disney World to meet up with one of Wade's lowlife buddies. He enlists them as couriers of a letter stolen from Princess Diana's coffin that they're to deliver to Florian, the Swiss head of Buckingham Pest Control in the Bahamas. Florian also runs one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical firms, and after dinner with Janet, who carries a pillbox "the size of a sewing kit," he cures her by clasping her bleeding hand to that of an immune Ugandan prostitute stolen from the Centers for Disease Control. The author just wants everyone to get along, but his sympathies evidently lie with 42-year-old loser Wade, pregnant women, and Janet. Withthis "pure and crud-proof" mom at the helm, he suggests, even the ill-starred Drummonds are not without hope. Little evocative description, even less character development: this time out, Coupland settles for improbable adventures inspired by middle-of-the-night channel surfing.

Kirkus Reviews

Praise for All Families Are Psychotic

"[All Families Are Psychotic] works because Coupland writes as sweetly and cleanly as a vapour trail." —Elle Canada

"[Douglas Coupland’s] focus is always on the moral implications, on human relationships and feelings. There is an almost spiritual aspect to his work that makes it emotionally compelling, and redemption is always at hand to pull his vision back from the brink of apocalypse. But more important perhaps, Coupland can write beautifully. . . . we shouldn’t ignore writers like Coupland who have vision and a thing or two to say. . . . Coincidence features heavily, there is the usual cast of zany characters, an outlandish series of events, the signature cynicism and wry humour - and transcendent moments of epiphany. . . . Coupland Country is ultimately a funny, quirky, compassionate and forgiving place to inhabit.” —Toronto Star

"With All Families Are Psychotic author Douglas Coupland has completed a seven-novel mission: he’s finally moved his characters out of the rumpus room. . . . offers a better view of our glittering, behemoth spaceship Earth than most offerings by the usual literary crowd. . . . Coupland ought to be our guide to today’s chilled, illed psychonauts of inner and outer space." —Quill & Quire

"There is wit à la early Pynchon or McGuane or Elmore Leonard, and the story does hum along - amazing twists and turns, snappy dialogue, meditations on the future, on postwar concerns: technology, feminism, consumerism, crime, junk culture, genetics." —The Globe and Mail

"Subtly subversive." —Georgia Straight

"As rich as an ovenful of fresh-baked brownies and twice as nutty. . . . Everyone with a strange family — that is, everyone with a family - will laugh knowingly at the feuding, conducted with a maestro’s ear for dialogue and a deep understanding of humanity. Coupland, once the wise guy of Generation X, has become a wise man." —People Magazine

"[Douglas Coupland] has ventured past his trademark satirical style to write an outright farce. . . . [He] has written what is probably his best novel to date. . . . The intricate pacing [is] more like 17th-century drama — John Webster, Ben Jonson or Molière — than slacker sitcom, which is truly a revelation. . . ." —L.A. Weekly

"Although the Drummonds appear to be self-destructing, author Coupland reveals himself to be, somewhat surprisingly, an optimist. For him, the new millennium is an era full of promise and potential miracles, despite the seemingly terminal state of the world." —Booklist

"Taking whacks at Florida is a bit like shooting a whale in a barrel, but Coupland does it with precision and originality. . . . vivid and true." —Washington Post

"True to Coupland's style, the book reads lightning fast. The author punctuates his narrative with clipped dialogue and punchy exchanges that advance the palpable sense of unease and tension running throughout. . . . The entire book brews and builds like a roiling tropical storm." —Amazon.com

"Chirpy, bright and strenuously zany." —The New York Times

"Coupland mines tabloid territory for sensationalism, which he then undermines with ironic self-awareness. The can-you-top-this atmosphere will keep Coupland's Gen-X readers (the ones who religiously watch Cops for the laughs) totally amused.” —Publishers Weekly

“It seemed paradoxical that a writer so revered for his hipness resembled, in practice, nobody so much as Jane Austen.... In the resultant unravelling there isn’t a boring page.” —The Literary Review

“He gets beneath their skin, convincing us that their lives of Gothic chaos contain their own perverse logic – a postmodern take on Tolstoy’s maxim that ‘all unhappy families are alike in their unhappiness.’ For a writer so immersed in the slippery textures of our time, Coupland reveals old-fashioned concern for the nature of our social interaction. He questions why we value what we do, and the price we pay to get it. He confronts our imprisoning luxury, with its Faustian freedoms. His hi-tech flights of fancy conceal a baffled humanist; one who echoes G. K. Chesterton’s remark that ‘people are much more eccentric than they are meant to be.’” —Sunday Express

“Coupland manages to balance the more weighty strands of the story with an absurdly satirical vision, without compromising either. At the same time, he mines the present with such intensity that it seems like science fiction. This strange, often miraculous fusion has you laughing, thinking and crying all at once, and suggests that Coupland’s writing is becoming more mature than ever.” —Evening Standard

“The most frightening element of the novel gives the lie to the truth of its title. Fantastic characters and a beyond-belief plot are insurance policies for white knuckles all the way, punctuated with belly laughs.” —i-D Magazine

"…being broken is a way of being together. Despite the meltdown of the family, this book lets us know that we don’t need to worry. . . . Coupland’s novel is ultimately optimistic. Like Anne Tyler, he intertwines the garish and unmeaning events he describes with a thread of hope, sometimes contained in a reminiscence of childhood, sometimes projected into a possible future. . . . Coupland presents us with a heroine rising above the mess of modern America, an honestly trusting person moving through the downbeat style and the defeated, disconnected world of modern America." —Times Literary Supplement

“[Douglas Coupland] is on an incredible creative roll. His last four novels . . . are so good and so distinctive that they seem to me to mark a genuine seismic shift in the literary landscape. Could it be that not everyone is as convinced of Coupland’s brilliance as I am? . . . . This is high melodrama: divorce, dysfunction, inter-generational sex, marital infidelity, life-threatening illnesses (everyone has at least one) and spacemen. But Coupland does not tell it in the florid, intense style of the melodrama queen. The tone is rather cool and slow, almost like a song played a beat behind the bar. . . . sophisticated . . . dreamlike.” [full review also compares Doug to Martin Amis and Haruki Murakami] —The New Statesman

“Coupland has been growing stronger with each subsequent book and has since Girlfriend In A Coma been making his pitch for best young writer in America (despite being born and brought up in Canada's Vancouver) —The Sunday HeraldPraise for Douglas Coupland

“Reading his increasingly assured prose is like watching a teen idol take on Hamlet and pull it off.” —Toronto Life

“The self-wrought oracle of our age.” —Saturday Night

“Douglas Coupland continues to register the buzz of his generation with a fidelity that should shame most professional Zeitgeist chasers." —Jay McInerney, The New York Times Book Review

Miss Wyoming“Equal parts love story and absurdist parable, it seamlessly meshes Coupland’s trademark ironic detachment with an unapologetic romanticism that has been absent from his previous work. The intelligence and humour of Coupland’s prose engages the mind while the unabashed yearning of his characters hooks the heart.” —Maclean’s

Girlfriend in a Coma“To call Coupland the John Bunyan of his set would not be hyperbole…. Girlfriend approaches an eccentric jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut.” —The Washington Post

Polaroids from the Dead“He bravely commits himself to material that is rich and deeply felt.” —The New York Times

Microserfs"The novel’s real fun is in the frequent and rapidly fired pop-culture references that spin the ’70s, ’80s, and ‘90s … and Coupland uses them with relish.” —Entertainment Weekly

Life After God“Coupland has at his disposal a dazzling array of tools with which to shape the emotions of his readers: the whimsy of a latter-day Jack Kerouac, the irony of a young Kurt Vonnegut, the poignancy of early John Irving.” —Bookpage

Shampoo Planet“Having called Coupland's first book a Catcher in the Rye for our time, I repeat myself. Nobody has a better finger on the pulse of the twenty-something generation.” —Cosmopolitan

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

All Families Are Psychotic 3.6 out of 5based on
0 ratings.
32 reviews.

elissajanine on LibraryThing

More than 1 year ago

Fun, funny, ridiculously unbelievable and bizarre but with moments of clear insight, goofy and entertaining.

LisaMaria_C on LibraryThing

More than 1 year ago

Despite a decent prose style, this was one of those books where I pulled out before fifty pages, because I just didn't find the characters and situations believable enough to invest time and caring upon. We learn before we reach ten pages that Sarah Drummond, a thalidomide baby with one hand, is a NASA astronaut. Not just a mission specialist mind you--and that alone would have been hard enough to buy--but the pilot of the space shuttle mission about to launch. Soon after that, we learn that "astronauts are always tiny, chosen for their lack of body mass." Well, I guess a lack of a hand might help there, but really I was soon convinced Coupland had never even googled "astronaut" or "NASA." Sarah's older brother Wade has AIDS. From what I can gather from before I left, he gave it to his mother via magic bullet when his father shot him and the bullet passed through him hitting his mother. Oh, and the reason his father shot at him was because he learned Wade was sleeping with his stepmother--who then gets AIDS. The other brother Brian, who has tried to commit suicide three times, brings his pregnant girlfriend to the shuttle launch. Her name is "Shw" in honor of "Sogetsu Hernando Watahabe--a martyred hero of the Peruvian Shining Path terrorist faction." By the time we learn that Wade is bringing his father into a drug deal, I decided that it wasn't simply the Drummond family or all families that are psychotic, but the author. And not in the whacky surreal way that allowed me to go with the flow and laugh.

scatterbrainbucket on LibraryThing

More than 1 year ago

This is my fave of all this man's awesome books.

ursula on LibraryThing

More than 1 year ago

This is a story about one of the more obviously psychotic families out there, with everything you can imagine thrown in -- affairs, guns, diseases, drugs, pregnancies, and much, much more. Sometimes it all became a little much to deal with, but overall it serves to illustrate the point that you're tied to the people to whom you are related, and even though you may think you have nothing in common with them or you hate them, that bond is always there, as real as it is inexplicable.

lahochstetler on LibraryThing

More than 1 year ago

This novel tells the story of a dysfunctional Canadian clan that finds itself in Florida in 2001 to watch its only overachieving member take off as a member of the space shuttle crew. It's possible that one has never met a family quite as dysfunctional as the Drummonds. Their promblems include AIDS, liver cancer, suicidal depression, thalidomide-caused birth defects, baby-selling, adultery, illegal prescription drugs, just to name a few. You wouldnt' think that a book about this much tragedy is funny, but indeed it is. In fact, this book is very funny indeed. It's nearly impossible to explain the plot without spoilers, so suffice it to say that the novel jumps back and forth between the family's past and present, showing that they've always had issues. This is a great book for when you need something laugh-out-loud funny. Coupland has a tremendous gift for the bizarre and absurd. When you're done, you won't think your life is quite so strange after all.

claudiabowman on LibraryThing

More than 1 year ago

This was a strange read. Parts of it were beautifully written and a treat to read. Other parts were so over-the-top, contrived, and ridiculous that it was just too much. I do realize that the author intends to be absurd, but after a while it just makes your eyes roll. Very Coupland, with the demure mother who isn't and criminal enterprises gone awry, etc. A mixed result. B-

ohjanet on LibraryThing

More than 1 year ago

A disappointing read from an otherwise clever man. This one doesn't seem amusingly critical like some of his other works. It's just a depressing look at pathetic people.

saskreader on LibraryThing

More than 1 year ago

Only Coupland can get away with what would otherwise be called a zany plot and cast of characters. He has a way of making the implausible seem completely possible, mostly through excellent character development. No matter the setting, etc., Coupland's stories have an underlying theme of melancholy, which is one of the reasons I keep reading him.

wideawakeandreading

More than 1 year ago

the-mother-daughter-book-cl
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All families may be psychotic but this one was a bit too much so. The dysfunction in this family was so out there. There was way too much drama and competing storylines. This left little room for character development, hence I felt no connection. I kept hoping the book would get better but to my disappointment it never did. I read my way through it as it was a book club selection. If I hadn't committed to read it I probably would of abandoned it mid way.

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ClarkP

More than 1 year ago

This book was a wild rollercoaster of a ride. Twists and turns, happy and unhappy moments...this book has it all. I always enjoy reading about people who can find beauty in the negative/ugly aspects of life. All Families are Psychotic has the ability to dig deep down inside your soul, making you re-examine your own life. Douglas Coupland is definately one of my favorite authors to read. A+ for All Families are Psychotic.

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